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Tag: aculocity

A Federal district court in Illinois recently addressed the scope of a limitation of damages provision in a dispute over automotive marketing software. The developer plaintiff in Aculocity, LLC v. Force Marketing Holdings, LLC, 2019 WL 764040 (N.D. Ill. 2019), sued the marketing company defendant for breach of contract – based on the defendant’s failure to pay for plaintiff’s software – and joined statutory copyright and trade secrets claims – based on the allegation that the defendant disclosed plaintiff’s software source code to third parties.

The defendant moved for partial summary judgment that plaintiff’s claimed damages were foreclosed by the contract’s damage limitation provision. The court denied as premature since no discovery had been taken on plaintiff’s claimed damages.

The agreement limited plaintiff’s damages to the total amount the software developer plaintiff was to be paid under the contract and broadly excluded recovery of any “consequential, incidental, indirect, punitive or special damages (including loss of profits, data, business or goodwill).” The contractual damage limitation broadly applied to all contract, tort, strict liability, breach of warranty and failure of essential purpose claims.

In Illinois, parties can limit remedies and damages for a contractual breach if the agreement provision is unambiguous and doesn’t violate public policy.

Illinois law recognizes a distinction between direct damages and consequential damages. The former, also known as “general damages” are damages that the law presumes flow from the type of wrong complained of.

Consequential damages, by contrast, are losses that do not flow directly and immediately from a defendant’s wrongful act but result indirectly from the act. Whether lost profitsare considered direct damages depends on their (the lost profits) degree of foreseeability. In one oft-cited case, Midland Hotel Corp. v. Reuben H. Donnelley Corp., 515 N.E.2d 61, 67 (Ill.1987), the Illinois Supreme Court held that a plaintiff’s lost profits were direct damages where the publisher defendant failed to include plaintiff’s advertisement in a newly published directory.

The District Court in Aculocity found that whether the plaintiff’s lost profits claims were direct damages (and therefore outside the scope of the consequential damages disclaimer) couldn’t be answered at the case’s pleading stage. And while the contract specifically listed lost profits as an example of barred consequential damages, this disclaimer did not apply to direct lost profits. As a result, the Court denied the defendant’s motion for partial summary judgment on this point. [*3]

The Court also held that the plaintiff’s statutory trade secrets and copyright claims survived summary judgment. The Court noted that the contract’s damage limitation clause spoke only to tort claims and contractual duties. It was silent on whether the limitation applied to statutory claims – claims the court recognized as independent of the contract. [*4] Since the clause didn’t specifically mention statutory causes of action, the Court refused to expand the limitation’s reach to plaintiff’s copyright and trade secrets Complaint counts.

Take-aways:

Aculocity and cases like it provide an interesting discussion of the scope of consequential damage limitations in the context of a lost profits damages claim. While lost profits are often quintessential consequential damages (and therefore defeated by a damage limitation provision), where a plaintiff’s lost profits are foreseeable and arise naturally from a breach of contract, the damages will be considered general, direct damages that can survive a limitation of damages provision.